Violated Hopes

A nation confronts a tide of sexual violence.

Lungile Cleopatra Dladla, who was raped in this field.Credit Photograph by Zanele Muholi

On a recent Sunday morning in the black township of Kwa Thema, near Johannesburg, a young lesbian couple went to church. Kwa Thema is one of many settlements that were created by the apartheid regime to contain and control the black majority population, and it remains isolated today. The two women, Bontle Khalo and Ntsupe Mohapi, are leaders of a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender organization called the Ekurhuleni Pride Organizing Committee, or EPOC. The couple formed the group three years ago, to combat rising violence against gays in Ekurhuleni, their municipality. They were concerned in particular about a gruesome crime known as “corrective rape”—an assault in which a man rapes a lesbian in an attempt to “cure” her sexual orientation. Another L.G.B.T. organization, in Cape Town, says that it deals with as many as ten such incidents every week. Since 1998, at least thirty-one lesbians have been killed in attacks that were motivated by their sexual orientation and many of which began with corrective rape. Few arrests have been made.

Khalo, twenty-seven, and Mohapi, thirty-nine, go to the Victory Fellowship World Outreach church every Sunday, accompanied by Xolile Dzanibe, a gay male friend who helped to found EPOC. Victory Fellowship is one of many evangelical churches established in South Africa in the late nineteen-seventies. Its congregation is mostly black. Although few churches in the country welcome gays, Khalo, Mohapi, and Xolile told me that they were accepted here.

Members of South Africa’s L.G.B.T. community encounter widespread discrimination, even though in some ways the country appears to promote tolerance—its constitution was the first in the world with a clause explicitly forbidding discrimination on the ground of sexual orientation. The language was included in the 1996 Bill of Rights, which was introduced two years after the transition from apartheid rule to democracy, and was intended to address South Africa’s history of prejudice and legally enshrined segregation. But, in a country with high levels of poverty and inequality, and few policies in place to reduce them, hostility toward “difference” has barely slackened, and crimes against gays, and women, have increased. South Africa, with a population of fifty million, has one of the highest rates of violence in the world—more than forty murders a day, on average—and the highest rate of rape.

Statistics from the International Criminal Police Organization in 2009 indicated that a woman is raped in South Africa every seventeen seconds, and that nearly half the victims are under eighteen. One woman in two can expect to be raped at least once in her lifetime. A study by the South Africa Medical Research Council, also published in 2009, reported that one in four men admitted having committed rape at one time or another.

In South Africa, lesbians face assault twice as often as heterosexual women. Lesbian rape victims speak of verbal abuse by the perpetrators, including shouts of “We’ll show you you’re a woman,” as though corrective rape were instruction in gender conventions. Unpublished research by the Johannesburg-based Forum for the Empowerment of Women suggests that black lesbians, especially those who are viewed as butch, and live in isolated townships, are particularly vulnerable.

In recognition of male as well as female victims, the definition of “rape” in South Africa’s penal code was recently widened to include not only vaginal penetration but “vaginal, oral, and anal penetration of a sexual nature by whatever means.” Anti-rape activists are pushing for more legal reform: an amendment of the sexual-offenses act to allow for heavier sentences, and the introduction of hate-crimes legislation, which would address corrective rape. The 2006 trial of Jacob Zuma, the nation’s President and the leader of the African National Congress, was a blow to their cause. Zuma, then sixty-four, stood accused of raping the thirty-one-year-old daughter of a family friend. He said that the woman in question had provoked him, by wearing a skirt and sitting with her legs uncrossed, and that it was his duty, as a Zulu man, to satisfy a sexually aroused woman. Such statements reflect the deeply embedded views of many South African men. After a two-month trial, Zuma was acquitted.

Aggression against gays is a clear illustration of the gap between the ideals of the constitution and the attitudes of the public. Only six years ago, Zuma called same-sex marriage “a disgrace to the nation and to God.” (He later apologized.) At a ceremony in January marking the anniversary of a Zulu victory over British imperial forces, the Zulu leader King Goodwill Zwelithini created a firestorm when he reportedly called people in same-sex relationships “rotten.” “Today, we are faced with different challenges,” Zuma said, in response. “Challenges of reconciliation and of building a nation that does not discriminate against other people because of their color or sexual orientation.”

As Khalo and Mohapi walked into the church, they were embraced by some of the women who were setting up white plastic chairs on the cement floor. The service began with a congregation of about a hundred people, mainly women and children, singing hymns in several local dialects. After they settled into their seats, the church’s deacon, a tall, brown-skinned man, walked to the altar to warm up the crowd before the sermon, which was to be delivered by a visiting pastor.

“I’d like to say, you are all so special,” the deacon said. A younger man in jeans and a white T-shirt played a soft vamp on an electric keyboard. “I understand that some of you may not comprehend that, when you are hurt, God has nothing to do with that,” the deacon continued. “Our God is an awesome God. He has never failed us!”

He began singing “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” Khalo and Mohapi rose along with the rest of the congregation and began waving their arms in the air, swaying back and forth, with a dip every few beats, and singing, until the deacon shouted “Hallelujah!”

He went on, “The Scripture says, ‘Fear not.’ Fear can torture you. Fear can imprison you. . . . Whatever you are fearing this morning, chuck it out! If the Lord has good thoughts about you, he is on your side.”

For Khalo and Mohapi, the deacon seemed to be speaking to the phenomenon of anti-gay violence, and bolstering the work of EPOC. The group had recently organized gay-pride marches throughout the municipality, demanding justice for Eudy Simelane, an internationally renowned athlete, and Noxolo Nogwaza, a member of EPOC. Both were lesbians who were brutally murdered, in attacks that seem to have begun with corrective rape. EPOC is also investigating the death of Girlie Nkosi, a lesbian who, a relative told EPOC activists, was stabbed in the abdomen with a sharp instrument by a man she had rejected sexually, and died from internal bleeding. The police, however, say that they have no reason to look into her death.

South Africans first became widely aware of the violence against lesbians when, in April, 2008, Simelane, a thirty-one-year-old former member of the national women’s soccer team, was killed. Simelane was one of the first openly gay women in Kwa Thema, and was training to be the first female referee at the Men’s World Cup, in 2010, in South Africa. Simelane was on her way home after a late night out with friends at a local bar, when a group of men jumped her and stabbed her multiple times in the face, chest, and legs. Her body was found face down in a drainage ditch. The entrance of her vagina was badly bruised, and some of the stab wounds, on the inside of her upper thighs, indicated to the doctor who performed the autopsy that the attackers had attempted to rape her.

“The whole community was outraged,” Khalo told me later at EPOC’s office, in Kwa Thema. The office is a cramped room in the back of the modest house that she and Mohapi share. The walls are covered with posters (“Just Let Us Be Happy People!”) and pictures of EPOC members marching in a gay-pride parade. In one photograph, demonstrators are carrying banners that read “I Am Stabane,” an appropriation of the otherwise derisive Zulu term for a homosexual person.

Soon after Simelane was murdered, four men were arrested in the case. Her celebrity undoubtedly made it easier for the police to find the killers. “A lot of people were there,” Khalo said. “A lot of witnesses weren’t afraid to speak out.” At the trial, two of the suspects were released for lack of evidence. The other two were convicted. Thato Mhpithi, twenty-three, received a thirty-two-year prison sentence, and Themba Mvubu, a twenty-four-year-old who had had Simelane’s blood on his clothing, was sentenced to life imprisonment. He smiled as he was walked from the courtroom. “I’m not sorry at all,” he told reporters, as friends of Simelane’s yelled that they wished he’d been sliced into pieces. It was a dramatic end to a contentious trial: Khalo recalled that the police had expressed disapproval of the way gay men in the courtroom were dressed, and had laughed at spectators in drag. At one point, the judge asked the prosecutor about the use of the term “lesbian”: “Is there another word that you can use instead of that one?”

The majority of South Africans subscribe to some form of Christian belief. This coexists with the remnants of traditional religions, which are imbued with patriarchal systems and ancestral notions of evil embodied in witches and sorcerers. During the apartheid years, when most Afrikaner whites belonged to the conservative Dutch Reformed Church, which excluded gays, homosexuality was a crime. Traditional black churches also weren’t welcoming to homosexuals. That began to change in 1994, after the African National Congress came to power. Leading clergymen, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the anti-apartheid crusader Reverend Allan Boesak, supported gay rights. Although the Dutch Reformed Church unsuccessfully opposed any mention of sexual orientation in the new constitution, it eventually began allowing gays to hold positions in the church.

In 1996, President Nelson Mandela’s multiracial government adopted a constitution that emphasized civil and political rights. Encouraged by the legislation and the national mood of liberation and diversity, gays came out in large numbers. In the years that followed, equality laws were tested and upheld in the courts, leading to equal protection for gays in the workplace. Sodomy laws were overturned. L.G.B.T.s gained rights in adoption, immigration, inheritance, and medical aid. They were permitted to serve openly in the military, and to have their sex change recognized on identity documents. The constitution mandated the creation of several state institutions to protect equal rights, including the Commission for Gender Equality and the South African Human Rights Commission. In the fall of 2004, in response to an application brought by a lesbian couple, the Supreme Court of Appeal ruled that the common-law definition of marriage must include same-sex marriage. In December, 2005, the Constitutional Court made any inferior status imposed on same-sex partners unconstitutional.

Most other African countries provide no legal protection for what many on the continent call “gayism.” More than two-thirds of African countries have laws that criminalize consensual same-sex acts. Two men who held an engagement party in Malawi in 2010 were sentenced to fourteen years of prison and hard labor. (They have since been pardoned.) In Nigeria, the senate recently passed a bill that could impose a fourteen-year jail term on anyone who enters into a same-sex marriage, and a ten-year sentence on anyone who helps to arrange one. Vandals in Senegal, one of the more stable and progressive democracies in Africa, have dug up the corpses of gay men and desecrated them. Last year, a well-known Ugandan gay activist named David Kato was murdered. Earlier this year, one of Liberia’s leading legislators introduced a bill that could impose the death penalty on homosexuals. And in Mozambique gays live under the threat posed by Article 71 of the penal code, which calls for “security measures” to be taken against anyone committing “vices against nature.”

In recent years, South Africa—officially, at least—has stood in contrast to most of Africa. On June 17, 2011, South Africa introduced a resolution in the United Nations Human Rights Council, calling for an end to “acts of violence and discrimination, in all regions of the world, committed against individuals because of their sexual orientation and gender identity.” It was called the council’s first gay-rights resolution, and South Africa and Mauritius were the only African countries to vote in its favor.

In a speech in Geneva six months later, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged all African countries to respect gay rights, implicitly threatening to withhold American aid to countries that fail to do so. “Gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights,” Clinton said. “Gay people are born into and belong to every society in the world. Being gay is not a Western invention. It is a human reality.” Clinton’s statement was condemned by some leading African politicians.

This March, in a video message shown at a meeting of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for an end to laws criminalizing homosexuality, citing seventy-six countries that have such laws. Leaning on a report presented by Navi Pillay, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, who is South African, he stated that the constant violence against lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people was “a monumental tragedy for those affected and a stain on our collective conscience.”

Pakistan, in response, and on behalf of the Organization of Islamic Coöperation, led a walkout of Muslim states, arguing that the resolution would promote “licentious behavior” and lead to the “legitimatization of many deplorable acts, including pedophilia and incest.” South Africa took a stand and prevented a walkout of African states during the debate.

South Africa’s decisive move in the U.N. was praised by liberals as a moral and diplomatic victory, but it did not correspond seamlessly to the country’s recent politics. In early May, the National House of Traditional Leaders—formed after the end of apartheid to advise the government on the interests and customs of various ethnic groups—asked Parliament to repeal the clause protecting citizens from discrimination on the ground of sexual orientation. The leaders were responding to the annual invitation of the constitutional-review committee—a multiparty parliamentary group—to submit suggestions for amendments, and they insisted that the “great majority of South Africans do not want to give promotion and protection to these things.”

Patekile Holomisa, a traditional leader and an A.N.C. member of Parliament, who also chairs the constitutional-review committee, said that homosexuality was “a condition that occurred when certain cultural rituals have not been performed,” and that gays should be taken to spiritual healers so that they could start to behave like other people in society. He warned that the A.N.C. could lose votes if it continued to ignore the values of its base by protecting gays.

The A.N.C. caucus pushed back against Holomisa the following day. A statement issued by the chief whip, Mathole Motshekga, emphasized that the A.N.C. “at no stage has considered debating this issue before Parliament.”

For a historically conservative country like South Africa, regardless of its progressive laws, the shock of so many gays coming out of the closet at once was profound. Places like Kwa Thema and Cape Town developed a reputation for being friendly to gay men and women, with relatively little discrimination and lively night life. Still, gays who patronized the small bars known as shebeens often faced insults from straight men.

Dipika Nath is a former member of the Task Team on Sexual Offences and Gender-Based Violence, a group that the Department of Justice established after the murder of Eudy Simelane and several other gay women. Last December, Nath wrote an extensive study for Human Rights Watch, “We’ll Show You You’re a Woman,” about violence and discrimination against black lesbians and transgendered men in South Africa. It was based on more than a hundred interviews, conducted in six of the country’s nine provinces. “There are real gaps in just information of what sexual orientation is, what gender is, what gender identity is,” Nath told me. “Coupled with that is a history of violence in the country.” She cited a number of factors to explain the increase in violence, including mass migration of male laborers to cities, unsafe working conditions, and the legacy of segregation and apartheid policies that encouraged violent crime in townships by leaving them deliberately unpoliced. She pointed, too, to widespread firearm use, beginning during colonial rule and continuing through apartheid. Socioeconomic inequality has persisted in the post-apartheid era, as have alarming rates of unemployment, lack of educational and economic opportunity, uneven functioning of state institutions, and the devastating effect of H.I.V. and AIDS.

I asked Saki Macozoma, a prominent businessman and a former employee of the South African Council of Churches, about this period of transition. “We live in an age that one Xhosa writer called ‘the generation of doubt,’ with one foot in traditional society and another in some form of modernity,” he said. He theorized that the fading authority of the clan, the unit that once instilled order in the lives of many South Africans, had created a “sense of rootlessness,” opening the road to criminality.

At the EPOC offices, a woman named Lungile Cleopatra Dladla, from a nearby township, told me of the night she was raped. Dladla, a stocky lesbian in her mid-twenties, was walking home one night with a female friend who was also gay. An armed man, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, came up behind them and directed them to a field. “Then he undressed us,” she said. “He tied us, and then he was going, ‘Ja, today I want to show you that you’re girls.’ ” He raped them both. “And then, immediately after, he dressed and untied my friend’s hand and then untied my feet and then he walked. You could hear the grass—like a snake is walking through the grass. From a distance, he shouted, ‘Now you can dress and go.’ My friend untied my hands, I untied her feet, and then we started dressing. He even wanted to take my clothes, because they’re man clothes: my shoes and T-shirt. He says he will leave the pants.”

The young women went to the local police station, where, Dladla said, she was “victimized” again; the police insisted that she was not a woman. “They said, ‘He’s not a girl. How can he be raped?’ ” Eventually, a former classmate who happened to work at the police station recognized her, and the officers finally took down information about the crime.

Dladla told me that she had been raped once before, when she was six or seven. The perpetrator was her father.

About two years after she was raped in the field, Dladla started having trouble breathing. She went to a doctor, who sent her to a hospital, where she was informed that she was H.I.V.-positive and very ill. The H.I.V. infection was so far advanced, she told me, that if she hadn’t been put on anti-retroviral drugs she would have died.

Dladla said her mother believes that she invited the rape, because of her homosexuality. Her mother has lost her job and has told Dladla she can no longer buy the healthy food that Dladla’s doctor recommends. Dladla said her only solace is that her assailant was finally arrested and convicted.

According to the South African Medical Research Council, the number of sexual offenses that occur in a given year is nine times as high as the number reported. (The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that half of all rapes and violent crimes committed in the country go unreported.) In addition to shame, stigma, and fear of retaliation, victims of sexual crimes, like Dladla, have described experiencing indifferent, if not hostile, attitudes from authorities—a phenomenon referred to as secondary victimization. Dipika Nath’s report indicates that South African policemen have also been commonly identified as perpetrators of sexual abuse.

Verdicts, too, tend to be lighter than advocates hope for. In 2007, a fourteen-year-old girl visiting from the United States was abducted while leaving a party and raped twice by the same man. The perpetrator could have received a life sentence but instead got eighteen years. This past February, four men were convicted of beating to death a nineteen-year-old lesbian, Zoliswa Nkonyana, after she left a bar in Khayelitsha, a township near Cape Town. It took almost six years to bring the case to court, and the men received sentences of eighteen years each. A news report on the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s Web site called the sentences “heavy,” but Nkonyana’s stepfather said that he was disappointed.

On April 24, 2011, Noxolo Nogwaza, a twenty-four-year-old lesbian, was found dead in Tsakane, the township adjacent to Kwa Thema. Like Simelane, the soccer player, she had been at a bar in Tsakane and was on her way home with a friend in the early-morning darkness. At some point, apparently, she and the friend separated. The following morning, at about 9 A.M., Nogwaza’s body was found in a ditch. It appeared that she had been raped. Her eyes had been plucked out of their sockets, her brain had split, and patches of her skin and teeth were strewn about. Although the neighborhood is densely populated, no one, including the security guards at nearby warehouses, came forward as a witness. Nogwaza’s death, two years after the high-profile trial for Simelane’s murder, brought greater attention to the increase in anti-gay violence, but there have been no arrests.

Captain Petros Mabuza, a rangy man with a genial manner, is the spokesman for the Tsakane police department. He said that at least five suspects had been taken in for forensic examinations but had been released. He speculated that the killer might have been drunk or on drugs.

I asked him if he thought that the case would ever be solved. One likely reason that no witnesses came forward at first, he said, was fear of revenge. Nevertheless, he told me, he was determined to find the murderers.

Mabuza admitted that his officers didn’t have much experience with homosexuals, and that he was unprepared when, last November, L.G.B.T. activists marched on his police station, demanding action on Nogwaza’s murder. He said that he was resolved to educate his officers about the trend of violence against lesbians, but that he knew of no other incidents of corrective rape in the area.

A few minutes away from the Tsakane police station, down a narrow alleyway, is the considerably smaller Kwa Thema police headquarters, an old brick building bustling with activity. The overseeing officer there is Colonel Matjie Johannes Manyathela. The Colonel’s manner is as genial as Captain Mabuza’s, and he, too, insisted that he knew of no other incident of corrective rape in the area. He was moved, he told me, by a discussion that he and Mabuza attended with local officials and leaders of the L.G.B.T. community, who told them that they were children of the same God. After the meeting, Mabuza said, he proposed setting up workshops to help sensitize the police and avoid further secondary victimization of rape victims by skeptical or hostile authorities.

Months later, no workshops have been conducted. Manyathela said that he spoke to his policemen after the meeting with L.G.B.T. representatives, telling them that they needed to respect the rights of homosexuals––rights, he reminded them, that are protected by the law that they have sworn to uphold. But Khalo told me that although EPOC had invited Mabuza to several meetings—including a memorial for Nogwaza—he failed to come, or even to send regrets.

Dipika Nath’s Human Rights Watch report, she says, provides meticulous evidence of “widespread, if not epidemic, hostility and violence against gay people—a far cry from the promise of equality and non-discrimination on the basis of ‘sexual orientation’ contained in the constitution.” Despite a lingering cultural conservatism, gay-pride parades are covered in the South African media, and gays have been featured in television soap operas. “Society,” a show on the S.A.B.C.’s public-TV channel, had a story line in which a lesbian couple were attacked by men for behaving affectionately in public. The 2012 Mr. Gay World pageant was held in South Africa, and tickets sold out, although there was some controversy about the date, given that it would be held on Easter Sunday. (Mr. Gay South Africa came in second to the winner, Mr. Gay New Zealand.)

In daily conversations, however, many South Africans, especially men, maintain that same-sex relationships are “un-African.” In a recent television special on corrective rape, the independent station ETV featured black men on the street saying things like “Sodom and Gomorrah were burned down because of this filth”; “It goes against nature”; and “We have lost our manhood because of these things.” Another said, “These gay things ought to be killed.”

Nath described the prevalence of gang rape in impoverished townships, a practice often referred to as “jackrolling” (after the Jackroller gang, which operated in Soweto in the late nineteen-eighties, and became notorious for abducting women and raping them). Not long after Nath and I met, a ten-minute jackrolling video went viral. The footage, taken and distributed by cell phone, shows a group of boys, between fourteen and twenty, raping a seventeen-year-old mentally disabled Sowetan girl. The girl, who doctors say has the mental capacity of a four-year-old, went missing for three weeks afterward. Her mother said that she had been raped several times before.

In Pretoria, I met with Juan Nel, a psychology professor and an L.G.B.T. activist who is also a member of the Task Team on Sexual Offences and Gender-Based Violence. Although Nel acknowledged that the recent cases of corrective rape “got the government to sit up straight,” he told me that the national discussion about violence against women and gays should be broader. “The media have been very quiet when it’s white men or black men who’ve been raped, sexually abused, assaulted, and subjected to grievous bodily harm,” he said. Currently, the police are looking into a connection between the murders of eight gay men, all killed in similar fashion, in the small but populous Gauteng province, where Johannesburg and Kwa Thema are situated.

Tlali Tlali, the spokesman for the Department of Justice, has been involved with the Task Team since it was set up. He insists that the group is making progress, getting the government to act more quickly in making arrests in cases that might involve corrective rape and bringing them to trial. He told me that the government, in line with the demands of N.G.O.s representing the L.G.B.T. community, has embarked on a campaign to make officials in the criminal-justice system better aware of homophobic violence and to reduce the secondary victimization described by rape victims like Lungile Dladla. He said that the government is also determined to move faster on hate-crime legislation, and to promote tolerance through school curricula. But he seemed to suggest that the South African leadership had few illusions. “Based on our violent history, it may not be easy for us to overcome some of these challenges,” he said.

When the service I attended at the Victory Fellowship World Outreach church was over, I approached the visiting pastor, Benjamin Mooke. I asked him if other branches of the church were as accepting of gays as the Victory Fellowship Outreach seemed to be.

He said, “We believe that Jesus, when he came, he was even able to talk to that woman,” referring to the woman at the well in Samaria. “Jesus, realizing that this woman needed help, he didn’t chuck her out. He said to her, ‘Go and buy food.’ And then he was left with her, and then he talked to her about the food and the truth was revealed and then she changed. We cannot fight the sinner. We don’t reject that person. If we send him out from the church, where do we expect that person to get help? That person is coming to the church to get help.”

I asked him if this meant that the church intended to undertake its own version of “correcting” gays and lesbians, and he told me that it was important to understand “what causes a person to be gay. What causes them to be lesbian. What causes them to be like that.”

Undistracted by the noise that the cleanup people were making as they put away the chairs, Pastor Mooke continued. “We believe God created men and women,” he said, but he added, as though speaking to the gay and lesbian community, “We have not made a stand, really, that we are for or against you.” ♦